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hyped garbage

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Alan Ayckbourn's play, 'Private Fears in Public Places', is one of his quieter comedies. Various people seek love and don't find it, for ordinary, mundane, sometimes embarrassing reasons: the plot, such as it is, is driven mostly by a rather ambiguous character whose motivations are never completely explained. But Ayckbourn has not been Britain's most successful playwright for nothing; and the dialogue sparkles, line after line displaying his knack for getting to the heart of the matter with economy, humour, and a feel for real life. At times, Alan Resnais' film, which features many short scenes but very few settings, seems to be trying a little too hard to pretend that this isn't just a filmed play, but without fundamentally changing the dramatic structure: he does, however, get excellent performances from his cast, and makes the work feel very naturally French. It's a pity that the BBC versions of Ayckbourn's work are mostly unavailable (and never, it seems, repeated); but Resnais rendering is still one to be enjoyed.

OK, the acting is good, and the camera work is competent, when we're not having to watch the lighting suddenly change for no reason, or when we're not wondering why two people sitting in a kitchen talking are getting snowed on. But the plot is ridiculous. The characters do a lot of talking, but not much else. Two of them allegedly work together in a real estate office, but they never do any work, and aside from one of the other characters in the movie, no one ever comes into their office. I kept wondering how they stayed in business. Two of them are allegedly brother and sister, but the sister is 40 years younger than the brother, and this difference is never explained. And why are they living together? Two are engaged, but there is not the slightest warmth between them, and we are left wondering how the engagement ever happened. Several characters seem to get a personality transplant halfway through the movie. One is always off camera, for no particular reason. None of them seems to have any basic common sense. They are completely unappealing, and therefore we never care what happens to them. The only compensation is the French, which is very clear and simple.

Coeurs is Alain Resnais 16th feature which he made at the age of 84. This film proved that Alain Resnais still has the same master within, he had in the 1960's. His brilliance and imagination sure didn't stop at Coeurs which he proved in 2009 by making Les herbes folles (Wild Grass), and apparently he is once again making a new film. Alain Resnais has always worked with incredible writers such as Marquerita Duras and Henri Laborit and this time his film is based on an English play 'Private Fears in Public Places' by Alan Ayckbourn. Coeurs is no blind visualization of an already-told story but an insightful look at the world of today, relationships, modern society and the conventional genre of romantic comedy.There is something incredibly sweet and beautiful in this simple storyline which, at first sight, might seem conventional and stereotypical with regards to romantic comedy. But the way Resnais builds dramaturgy is anything but conventional; as we move from brief scene to another and observe the situations where the characters come across with each other. The themes of the film are common for the director - intimacy, loneliness, disappointment and getting old, but new are the postmodern criticism for the mass culture of television, and a superior way of dealing with the tragicomic fantasies of his characters.Coeurs features three of Resnais' standard actors (Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi) but new-comers in the world of Alain Resnais are an Italian actress Laura Morante and a French woman Isabelle Carré. Dussollier plays a bitter real-estate agent Thierry who has a dynamic, fundamental Christian colleague Charlotte (Sabine Azéma). Lionel (Pierre Arditi) is a slightly frustrated bartender who listens to the worries of Dan (Lambert Wilson) whose relationship isn't going so well with Nicole (Laura Morante) who tries to find a perfect home for her and Dan. Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) is Thierry's sister who desperately tries to find a date, and eventually becomes acquainted with Dan.The film has six protagonists and it wraps around certain threads of blind chance that seem to pull the characters together. It's a film about six people who come across with each other without really meeting or knowing each other. Each scene features a situation between two characters and we are quickly thrown from one situation to another but still never lose our track of what is going on. I think Resnais has found new emotional scales in Coeurs, which he didn't have before in his political films (1960's) nor in his "philosophical" films (1980's). The viewer actually cares, and has sympathy for the characters portrayed - which is too rare these days. I love, and prefer, the earlier films by Resnais so I mean no disrespect for them. This elegant story about six people remind the viewer of Resnais' classic Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and a bunch of other films by him, for example, Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) - where there is a certain ensemble of protagonists.Coeurs is a very Resnaisian film in all its histrionics. The film is entirely filmed in a setting that is clearly a studio. For instance, there are no roofs which is shown to the viewer in bird perspective shots. In the real-estate office there are movable glass walls, and we see that the characters don't notice it, but the camera shows it to us - fiction knows that it's fiction, the movie admits that it is only a movie. Strong pastel shades also characterize Coeurs - pink, orange and white walls, and lights.The characters make different interpretations of the same theme of sad melancholy life and the inability of man to see. The span of these themes is incredibly wide; from tragic (Lionel and his cruel father) to pathetic (Thierry and Gaëlle). Snow is the most surreal, Resnaisian, element of the film. Throughout the film it snows - everywhere. Resnais had already used snow flakes in L'Amour a Mort where he wanted to tell about life, death and hereafter. But in Coeurs the snow represents a wintry state of mind and the benumbed emotional lives of the characters.

Adapted from Alan Ayckbourn's recent (2004) play, this movie has a structure that reminds me of two well known plays. The structure of some 50 short scenes brings to mind Noel Coward's "Cavalcade". Having plots revolving around 6 characters draws an obvious comparison to Luigi Pirandello's "Six characters in search of an author". But both similarities are superficial. "Private fears" is a distinctly different play.The interrelationship between the six characters is somewhat random, but clever for this very randomness. These various relationships include real estate agent and client, office co-workers, brother/sister, part-time aged-parent-sitter and employer, engaged couple living together, bartender and familiar client, blind dates. Each character is party to two or three of these relationships. Some of these relationships we see right from the beginning; others evolve right before our eyes. Outwardly casual relationships have subtle intimacy; apparently intimate relationships turn out to be rather casual. The emotional spectrum goes from heart-breaking poignancy to hilarious farce. There is never a dull moment in this movie, (except to those who have a tendency to fall asleep UNLESS there is a car chase, an explosion or steaming sex)."Private fears" also offers a good mix of art house appeal and mainstream entertainment. Artsy scenes, not overused, enrich the film throughout: entire scene shot from overhead, montage transformation of a conversation at a kitchen table to the snowy outdoors - just two most conspicuous examples. Nor does the movie shy away from cliché comic situations when then are called for.This portrayal of ultimate loneliness in the urban alienation of the City of Lights is brought to the audience by an excellent cast of mostly director Alain Resnais' veterans.